


In Return

by KingLilith



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Gift Giving, IronHawk - Freeform, Tony Stark Gets a Hug, not as crack-ish as it sounds, this got so cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 16:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14980580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingLilith/pseuds/KingLilith
Summary: Clint is an idiot who thinks he can woo his favourite billionaire by bringing him pretty rocks and colourful pieces of glass like some overgrown preschooler.And he’s absolutely right.





	In Return

Clint has come down to the lab to inform Tony he’s back from his mission and staying at the tower for the foreseeable future (as if JARVIS hadn’t already told him that, but whatever), and Tony is… distracted. Clint is talking excitedly and gesticulating wildly while moving around, which is entertaining, so Tony almost misses it when he puts something in Tony’s left hand before he retreats back upstairs with a lame joke while shooting finger guns.

Tony looks from where the doors closed behind Clint down to his hand. He is holding a rock.

Clint gave him a rock.

Tony scratches his head, trying to understand what is going on.

He examines the rock, trying to determine if there is anything special about it, but no, it’s just a rock. It is pleasantly smooth and a nice deep colour with blue flecks, but still just a rock. Tony eventually just shrugs and decides to use it as a paperweight before going back to work. If it was anything important Clint would tell him.

But it happens again. And again. Each time Clint comes back from a mission, even if it’s just a day long, he brings Tony something. Even when it’s an Avengers mission and Tony himself is there as well.

The second time Clint brings him something Tony is more mentally aware and thanks him when he is handed another nice-looking stone. Clint smiles brightly, and Tony might have lost his train of thought for a moment or two before smiling back and putting the rock next to the previous one. His plan on using it as a paper weight had kind of fallen trough when he figured out he didn’t really keep much paper around. So now it was just sitting on his desk where he looked at it every time he was looking for his favourite soldering iron.

Clint looks stupidly happy when he sees Tony set the new stone carefully next to the first one and gives an awkward little wave before he skedaddles back up again, finger guns having made way for several thumbs-up motions. And gods, Tony should not find that as endearing as he does.

Clint brings him two more rocks before handing him a small condiment jar with two colours sand, lid held down with copious amounts of Sellotape. Tony lets out a soft ‘oh’ at the pretty way the colours glitter behind the class before he says thank you. Clint flushes slightly and leans against one of Tony’s workbenches for a moment before continuing the story about the apparently epic bitch-fight he witnessed between a camel herder and a dromedary herder during the mission he isn’t supposed to tell Tony about.

Tony laughs at the story and tries not to feel to fuzzy inside when Clint flushes when Tony leans into him a bit while laughing. It’s smugness he tells himself, smug is an acceptable emotion.

It goes on for a while. They don’t talk about it outside of the workshop. Tony doesn’t tell Clint over breakfast how much he likes the green and grey feathers he gave him last night. And the next time they have a team meeting Clint doesn’t mention the rubber ball he gave Tony that he himself had drawn a face on (they named it Nancy).

Inside the workshop however, such rules do not apply. Tony wastes no time informing Clint that he absolutely loves his newest rock and shows Clint how the light bounces off it. And Clint is terribly proud when he presents Tony with two cool-looking leaves that he managed to bring him without them getting lost or torn. (Tony is impressed, and tells Clint so, who manages to blush and look smug at the same time.)

The ‘not-talking-about-it’ arrangement goes out the window once Clint brings him the foot. It’s a chicken foot, cut off and dried out in a way that kept its colour and able to stand upright on its own. It is amazing. On the top where it had been cut you can see the dried-out bone and tendon and Tony had grabbed Clint’s hand to tug him close and kiss his cheek in excitement. Both blushed but neither had let go of their hands, so they stood there slightly stupidly, holding hands and admiring the foot.

They  unanimously decided that this one was too cool to just keep to themselves, so Tony gleefully rides up with Clint in the elevator and starts showing off his new present to all the people he encounters.

Bruce pokes it, and starts talking about the drying process, which is mildly interesting but not as important as the fact that, no, this is Tony’s Bruce can’t pick it apart.

They find Natasha after that, who mostly ignores the foot and instead zeros in on the almost non-existent space between Tony and Clint before she does some complicated eyebrow thing at Clint who makes an awkward gesture in return before pointedly not blushing and looking away.

Cap at least seems to like it. Though at first he does try to roll his eyes and calls them childish but eventually he has to admit it’s really cool, if slightly disgusting.

Pepper just frowns at them both when they break into her office and Tony shoves it under her nose. Then she just sighs. “Yes Tony, I know. Clint get’s you all the best gifts, the hacked off chicken foot is amazing.” She shakes her head slightly “All those people trying to buy your favour with sports car and million-dollar watches, and all it would have taken was a weirdly shaped chestnut or something.” She looks down to where Tony is still holding the foot close to her face “Or a hacked-off limb in this case.”

Tony frowns and finally retracts the dead appendage from her immediate space. “Nobody is buying favours here Pep.” His voice is slightly cold, and she winces. “Apologies, that could have been worded better.”

She gives Clint an apologetic look, but he just shrugs. “Don’t worry ‘bout it. I just happened find this, nothing to do with Tony.” For a super spy he doesn’t sound or look very convincing. So Pepper just lifts her eyebrow before sighing shooing them both from her office. “Go play somewhere else, I have a company to run.” And kicks them out with a reminder for the meeting Tony has tomorrow with R&D.

Tony pulls a face, and then lures Clint back into his lab with him with promises of explosions and weapon-upgrades.

After that the cat is rather out of the bag.

After a while no-one is surprised when they see Tony excitedly waving around a stick with dried up resin on it in pretty and smooth patterns while standing in the living room with a happy looking Clint.

Most of the things Clint brings him don’t make it out of the workshop very often, though some of the stones have started to migrate a bit. The empty, slightly cracked jar with a funky lid that Tony immediately decides to use it to hold several small parts that keep cluttering up his workspace is never noticed by anyone other than Tony and Clint themselves. And somewhere, stuffed in a drawer nobody ever looks in, is a packed of something that is either salt or sugar. They are not sure.

The first flower comes soon after their first official date. (And Tony had not blushed when Clint asked him out officially, asked Jarvis for advice, called Rhodey, and been a total emotional wreck. No Sir.) Tony stares at the roots and earth falling from Clint’s hands before he declares it the best stolen flower ever, and carefully takes it from Clint to put in an old slightly mangled ironman helmet while ordering JARVIS to buy more dirt or whatever plants needed. He pouts a bit when he kisses Clint and Clint manages to control his blushing and Tony himself doesn’t. Clint kisses him to make up for it, so it’s fine.

One time Clint doesn’t come to the workshop right after Tony knows his mission ended. Tony waits a grand total of twenty five minutes before hacking shield and finding out that Clint is injured.

He might or might not have stormed the SHIELD headquarters he isn’t supposed to know exists in full Ironman regalia and given junior agents heart-attacks before finding Clint and flinging himself in a chair in the waiting area in front of Clint’s room.

Clint wakes hazily a few times over the course of several hours before waking up properly. He is clearly in pain and a bit moody, but brightens a when Tony is let into the room by an resigned looking agent.

There are careful hugs and kisses, with Tony shifting between promising the best medical care available if he comes recuperate in the tower and berating him for getting hurt in the first place. “I have a heart condition Birdie, you can’t do this to me.” But he doesn’t ask Clint to make any promises he might not be able to keep, which Clint kisses him for.

When they come up for air in-between kisses Clint tells Tony, “The green bag under the bed, front pocket.” and nudges Tony until he gives up his awkward and careful position over Clint’s bed in favour of rummaging underneath it.

Tony pulls out the battered bag and unzips the front pocket with badly disguised curiosity. He pulls out the slightly squashed potato and looks at it in confusion for a moment before grinning and bending over Clint again for another kiss.

“Sorry it wasn’t anything better.” Clint tells him later, when he has been transported to Stark Tower to heal there in the lap of luxury with an attentive boyfriend. “I tried to find something cooler, but I didn’t have much opportunity this time.”

Tony shakes his head. “Don’t be stupid, I love it.” He cuddles closer to Clint and puts his face to his shoulder while being careful not to press against any of Clint’s wounds. “Though it might be the only present you have given me that will have to be thrown away eventually.”

“Good.” Clint says. “I don’t want to be reminded of this mission anyway.” His kisses Tony’s forehead before settling in, best he gets some sleep before Natasha breaks in to yell at him.

It takes a while for Clint to be allowed to go back in the field again. But he has never been good at twiddling his thumbs, so he managed to talk himself into several non-demanding short-term mission.

For Tony this means that within a short period of time he acquires; A jar with a spider in it (The spider is dead long before Tony receives it), several pinecones, a bright red ticket-stub that just says ‘Admit one’, several rocks and a bundle of twigs tied into the shape of his arc-reactor.

That last one had been a big hit. Tony hadn’t let Clint out of the bedroom for quite some time after getting that one. Even _Pepper_ had sniffed and called it incredibly romantic. Tony hung it in their bedroom and didn’t tell Clint how much better it felt to be able to look at it on the days he had to sleep there alone (because he was a grown man, damn it, not some schoolgirl with a crush).

The first longer mission Clint goes on takes four days. And Tony is not worried. No sir.

He does not compulsively rearrange the popsicle stick with doodles on it and the Jar-lid with a joke on it in Quechan that he really doesn’t understand while he should be working on redesigning some SI software.

“I’m not even sure why I’m having such a hard time with it.” He confides in Rhodey. “We’ve been apart  longer than this before, we both have insanely dangerous jobs. But I’ve never been this nervous before. I’m just not sure what changed.”

“Well, despite you getting injured a lot on a regular basis,” Rhodey sends him a look that makes clear what he thinks about that. “Clint doesn’t really get any serious injuries that often. Y’know, he’s usually out of the way as a sniper, and good enough not to get injured during the times that he does have to jump in the middle of it. So, I don’t know, you just might have been reminded of his mortality or something.” He puts his hand on Tony’s arm in a slightly awkward but comforting gesture. “You’ll probably get used to it again.”

Hopefully he will. But this time he worries. And when Clint gets back –finally!- he literally jumps him. Who needs dignity anyway.

His present this time is a battered gel-pen. All Tony’s documents are signed in glittery orange until the pen runs out of ink.

Tony is sitting in his office at SI. Fiddling with the one present from Clint he has in here; a smooth stone egg that Tony built an insanely fancy holder for. He always tries to convince everyone who enters his office that it’s a Faberge egg, but so far there had been no takers. There was a pile of paperwork in front of him that he should be doing (actual paper, yuck. He didn’t even have a pretty rock to put on top of it.), but instead he was contemplating Clint like some lovesick girl.

It sounded stupid, even to himself but Clint is just so… reassuringly human.

He is the only other fully baseline human on the avengers next to Tony (Natasha doesn’t count, Tony still isn’t convinced she’s not from another dimension) and he makes Tony feel safe. Which is stupid. Tony is Ironman, and he lives in a tower with some of the strongest people in history, he fought literal aliens, but Clint is the one who makes him feel safe.

He is strong, but within the range a normal human can achieve, with no advantages of alter-egos or science experiments. He looks good, but in a normal-dude way, he doesn’t have the otherworld-ness of Thor or the over-exaggerated human-perfection-ness of Steve. He is clever, but not in the calculated way Natasha and Bruce are.

He is not what anyone would call normal, of course. But he is human in a way the others are not.

And Tony loves it.

He loves that when he touches Clint the can feel the scars, smell the sweat and see the wrinkles in both Clint’s brow and his clothes.

He loves that when Clint touches him his rough hands are soft and warm, steady and human in a way that grounds Tony. That when Clint lays down on top of him his body is the perfect weight and softness to keep him covered, but not so much it would be impossible for Tony to move with his own strength if he wanted to.

He loves that Clint keeps giving him these stupid little gifts, and that they still make his stomach flutter, that each time Clint gives him something new even though the point has been made and the novelty of it should have worn of.

And… and he really should be getting back to work. Tony determinately does not think of Clint as he works through the pile of paperwork (in normal ink unfortunately, the gel-pen had long since run out) like the adult he is.

When he gets home that evening (it is already dark, those stupid meetings always run late) Clint is waiting for him, freshly scraped from his latest mission, and hands him a colourful piece of glass. Together they watch the light dance and hold it up to the light so the reflection casts pretty patterns on the walls. Tony is at loss at how to tell Clint how much these things, and Clint himself, mean to him.

Cap complains very loudly about the way Tony chooses to demonstrate that care when he comes across them mid-demonstration.

**Author's Note:**

> The Gifts:  
> • Rocks  
> • Small condiment-jar with two colours sand, lid held down with copious amounts of Sellotape  
> • Feathers  
> • A rubber ball with a face drawn on it  
> • A chicken foot. Dried up and able to stand upright on its own. (It has a prominent place in Tony’s rooms for Pepper to glare at when she walks by.)  
> • A stick with dried resin on it in pretty and smooth patterns.  
> • Several cool-looking leaves  
> • Half-filled in kids puzzle book in Spanish. (Tony fills out the rest of it, despite having to look up the words constantly).  
> • An empty, slightly cracked jar with a funky lid (Tony immediately decides to use it to hold several flash drives/small parts that keep cluttering up his workspace)  
> • A packet of something that is either salt or sugar. They are not sure  
> • A potato  
> • Flowers. (often with roots still attached, and always clearly stolen from someone’s garden/forest)  
> • A jar with a spider in it (The spider is dead long before Tony receives it)  
> • A bright red ticket-stub that just says ‘Admit one’ and nothing else.  
> • A smooth stone egg  
> • One battered glitter gel-pen.  
> • Several pinecones  
> • Several twigs tied together in the shape of an Arc-reactor  
> • A string with a chestnut tied on each end (Tony often fidgets with it. It’s great for swinging around and makes a satisfying ‘clack’ noise when the two chestnuts are banged together)  
> • A piece of glass with several colours  
> • A popsicle stick with drawings/doodles on it Clint did while bored  
> • A tiny fake mushroom with a long iron wire in the bottom for it to stick into something.  
> • A Jar-lid with a joke on it in Quechuan that Tony really doesn’t understand.  
> • A badly-knotted bracelet from three types of yarn. (it’s so ugly. Tony loves it and wears it forever)  
> No matter what JARVIS says, when the tower is wreaked (again) Tony does not insist that every window has a windowsill where possible so he has places to leave Clint’s gifts. It’s just a coincidence.


End file.
